No Confidentiality at Work

No Confidentiality at Work

It's time to overhaul policies on access to data and apps, according to a new survey from SailPoint. A surprisingly large percentage of workers feel that there’s nothing wrong with reading confidential files that they're not supposed to see, and many employees have no reservations about stealing electronic assets when they leave a job. In fact, workers are more likely to steal e-data these days than a stapler. The upshot: IT managers face a real challenge in balancing business risk with the need for access to sensitive data and applications. "Many employees may not believe that taking company data is equivalent to stealing,” says Jackie Gilbert, vice president of marketing and a cofounder at SailPoint. “It highlights what I call a 'moral grey area' around ownership of electronic data. As frequently as employees move to competitive companies, these attitudes are major red flags for employers." Nearly 1,600 full-time, part-time and contractual employees in the U.S. and the United Kingdom took part in the survey.